PowerBI Analytics – Forecasting your turnover

This is a short update on the new, still in preview, feature that allows you to create forecasts on time phased data.

I am personally very exited about this feature as it very easy gives you the possibility to create a “guess” on how your business will look in the coming years  .

So, diving in.

Take the turnover in your business and activate the forecasting feature. You will get calculated forecast on what your turnover might be in the coming years and a high/low estimation of what will happen.

So how do you activate it?

First we need to activate the preview feature (note that this feature is still not available in PowerBI.com.

Then you need a dataset with at least a date column and a value column.

Now, create a new line chart and add the two columns (dates and values).

 

Go to the new Analytics tab and add a new forecast. Set the forecast to the desired number of forecast points (20 in my case) and see he chart being updated.

That’s it, now you can create simple forecasts.

The method PowerBI uses to do the forecast is called Linear Regression, I will not go into detail about this method but a quick Google search and you can easily find good descriptions on how the forecast is calculated.